Ridiculing the Other The Politics of Humour and Imaging in early modern Dutch moffenkluchten

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Ridiculing the Other

The Politics of Humour and Imaging in early modern Dutch moffenkluchten

Title page Klucht van de Mof (1644) by Isaac Vos

MA Thesis (Research Master) Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies Karlijn Luk

August 7th_{, 2019}

Word count: 22.739 Supervisor: Ivo Nieuwenhuis Second assessor: Geertje Mak

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1

Introduction: innocent entertainment?

Imagine that you are going to see a performance at the theatre tonight about an immigrant in the Netherlands. It is a comic play and in it it, the main character is a caricature version of an immigrant, speaking some sort of fake language and barely understanding Dutch. He thinks maybe he can find a nice Dutch girl to marry him. Stupid, of course, because why would any Dutch girl ever marry an immigrant? In fact, the lovely Dutch girl he tries to impress tricks him and the play ends with the immigrant being beaten up and sent into the streets naked. He cries and does not ever wish to return to the Netherlands ever again. All’s well that ends well… right?

Now imagine this specific play being referred to by critics and even by academic researchers as ‘simply innocent entertainment’. Well, what you just read is actually the plot of an existing Dutch play from the seventeenth century. Plays like these were immensely popular in the Netherlands during the early modern period, and have indeed been framed as ‘innocent entertainment’.

The play that I described here is a farce titled ‘Klucht van de Mof’ and as this title already suggests - at least for most Dutch people who will recognise the term mof -, the immigrant in question is of German origin. Short comic plays that specialised in the ridiculing of these German immigrants were not at all uncommon at the time. In fact, they were even so popular that they formed their own genre of the early modern Dutch farce, or kluchtspel, called moffenkluchten.

Though the word mof in the modern-day Netherlands has a connotation relating to the mocking of the German oppressor during the Second World War, the word itself and its use for name-calling Germans has a much longer history. Starting early in the seventeenth century, the word was often used to refer to German immigrants that came to the Dutch Republic. The term was possibly derived either from the German Muff (meaning grumpy or big-mouthed person) or the Northern Dutch region Muffrika. On the Dutch stage, the mof created a strong German stereotype.

Though the moffenklucht as a genre has not been treated often in historical research, there have been some before me who have researched the subject. For example, there is a published lecture from 1970 on the mof in early modern Dutch comedy and farce in which Willem Ornée has given a brief overview of the different plays which include the German stereotype of the mof.1_{Where Ornée}

considers rather briefly the varieties within this German stereotype, Leo Lucassen, in his contribution to a volume from the Anne Frank Stichting called Vreemd gespuis, shifts the research focus to the reaction of the Dutch to the arrival of these German immigrants.2_{He states that the stereotyping and}

1_{W. A. Ornée, De ‘Mof’ in de Nederlandse blij- en kluchtspelen uit de 17}e_{en 18}e_{eeuw (Groningen, 1970).}

2_{Leo Lucassen, ‘Poepen, Knoeten, Mieren en Moffen: beeldvorming over Duitse immigranten en trekarbeiders} in zeventiende- en achttiende-eeuwse kluchten’ in: Anne Frank Stichting, Vreemd gespuis (1987).

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4 ridicule of the German immigrants did not form an obstacle for them to assimilate in Dutch society and that the mockery of the German immigrants was of an innocent nature, meant only as entertainment.3

In a collection on 350 years of migration, H. Mertens-Westphalen wrote a similar overview of the varieties within the German stereotype in early modern Dutch farces to that of Ornée. However, he pays a little more critical attention to how these moffenkluchten were presumably received by audiences.4_{Mertens-Westphalen states in his introduction that the negative connotations as}

portrayed in these farces lived on well into the nineteenth century, but other than referencing some examples of nineteenth-century works that make mention of these moffen, he does not elaborate on this any further.

Though, unlike her predecessors, literary historian Lotte Jensen only analyses two

moffenkluchten instead of the genre as a whole, she seems to have been the first to further explore

what could have caused this negative image of German immigrants, or at least where it might have come from.5_{She argues that the Dutch represented these Germans in a negative way in order to clarify}

and defend their own ‘threatened’ identity within the rivalry between the two similar Germanic identities: ‘Door in ‘de ander’ eigenschappen te hekelen die voor het eigen volk ook geldig waren, wordt het eigen volk als het ware tijdelijk van diezelfde negatieve reputatie gevrijwaard. Naar een alledaags niveau vertaald: ondeugden die op jezelf van toepassing zijn, veracht je des te meer bij een ander. Zelfbeeld en beeld van de ander hangen in die zin nauw met elkaar samen.’6_{Johanna Ferket}

recently published an article taking this train of thought even further by looking at other reasons behind this negative imaging that Dutch playwrights could have. She concludes that the criticizing of Germans was used as a ‘safe’ way to criticize problems within the own Dutch society. ‘Laughing at ‘others’,’ she explains, ‘created a sense of solidarity among the audience’, while ‘criticizing Dutch culture and populace [...] involved a risk for the author and actors. The audience could take the criticism personally and since theatre needed an audience to survive, this could be very harmful.’7

Ferket’s point of view is particularly interesting because she has a more critical perception of the genre of farce in general, seeing it as more than just entertainment.

3_{Lucassen, ‘beeldvorming over Duitse immigranten’, 37.}

4_{H. Mertens-Westphalen, ‘De Duitser en de Hollandganger in de kluchten uit de 17e en 18e eeuw’, in: Eiynck,} A., et.al. (red.), Werken over de grens. 350 jaar geld verdienen in het buitenland (Assen, 1993).

5_{Lotte Jensen, ‘‘Libben labben an eyn stucxken swijne vless’: ‘Moffen’-beeld bij de toneelschrijver Isaac Vos’,} Vooys 15 (1997), 22-27.

6_{Jensen, ‘Moffen-beeld bij de toneelschrijver Isaac Vos’, 26.}

7_{Johanna Ferket, ‘‘All these things one has to endure from these Germans’: Germans Stage Characters as Means} to Criticize Changing Social Positions in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam’, Dutch Crossing 42:1 (2018), 47-61, here 47.

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5 Peet Theeuwen, in his research on eighteenth-century hack-writer Pieter ‘t Hoen, notices a shift in the genre of moffenkluchten at the end of the eighteenth century. Like Lucassen, he states that these German immigrants indeed assimilated rather well into Dutch society, but that the economic recline and growing numbers of unemployment in the second half of the eighteenth century made many Dutchmen see German immigrants as unwanted competition on the labour market. According to Theeuwen, the farces were influenced by these developments as well: ‘De kluchten, tot dan toe gevuld met platvloerse en voor de Duitsers onaangename maar geenszins bedreigende humor, verscherpten na 1750 hun toon tot een soms nationalistisch getinte rancune tegen deze buitenlanders.’8

It is striking that Theeuwen admits to later moffenkluchten containing a sometimes nationalistic hate towards these German immigrants after 1750, but that he would still refer to the humour in moffenkluchten before 1750 as ‘in no way threatening’. With this point of view, Theeuwen seems to side with Lucassen, who sees the imaging of Germans in these farces as innocent because it did not lead to widespread government-supported discrimination.9_{This way of thinking about the}

humour in these farces seems problematic to me because it does not take into account the political implications of humour in itself.

For a long time, scholars researching humour have mostly focused on its positive, liberating and critical effects.10_{However, more recently, another more critical tradition of humour research has}

emerged that considers the negative and conservative properties of humour, without necessarily denying the positive properties. Some examples of scholars who belong to this more critical tradition of humour studies are Michael Billig, Nicholas Holm, Giselinde Kuipers, Ivo Nieuwenhuis and Dick Zijp.11

Using theories on the politics of humour from within this more critical tradition in combination with theories on the politics of imaging and ‘othering’, I wish to look at the negative and conservative properties of humour in the past through the case study of early modern Dutch moffenkluchten and

8_{Peet Theeuwen, ‘Een fictieve broodschijver: Pieter ’t Hoen en het vroege oeuvre van J. A. Schasz M.D’,} Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman 24 (2001), 89-103, here 97.

9_{Lucassen, ‘beeldvorming over Duitse immigranten’, 37.}

10_{See for example: Simon Critchley, On Humour (London, 2002).}

11_{Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (thousand Oaks, 2005); Nicholas} Holm, Humour as Politics: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary Comedy (London, 2017); Giselinde Kuipers, Goede humor, slechte smaak. Een Sociologie van de mop (Amsterdam, 2001); Giselinde Kuipers, ‘The politics of humour in the Public Sphere: Cartoons, Power and Modernity in the First Transnational Humour Scandal’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 14:1 (2011), 63-80; Ivo Nieuwenhuis, Onder het mom van satire: Laster, spot en ironie in Nederland, 1780-1800 (Hilversum, 2014); Ivo Nieuwenhuis, ‘Conformist Comedians: Political Humour in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic’, in: I. Mackenzie, et. al. (Eds.), Comedy and Critical Thought: Laughter as Resistance (London, 2018), 103-118; Dick Zijp, Re-Thinking Dutch Cabaret: The Conservative Implications of Humour in the Dutch Cabaret Tradition (unpublished MA thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2014).

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6 the imaging of German immigrants through humour on the early modern Dutch stage. The main aim of this thesis is to further explore the political workings of humour through analysing the interaction between humour and (negative) imaging in this conservative genre. Though there is undoubtedly a shift at the end of the eighteenth century to a more explicitly political and more xenophobic type of humour in these farces, I will argue that the humour used in these moffenkluchten in relation to the German immigrants has never been ‘innocent’ in the first place.

Because moffenkluchten as a genre beautifully embody both a notion of imaging (through the pejorative stereotype of the mof) and a notion of humour (through the comic genre of the klucht), it forms an interesting case study for researching the interplay between humour and imaging. Both of these components shall also form the silver lining for this thesis. In the first two chapters, both components will be looked at in parallel, while the third chapter analyses the imaging component through an analysis of the mof character itself, and the fourth chapter is an analysis of the humour component as it considers what humour actually does in these farces.

My first chapter introduces the theories on humour and imaging that form the theoretical framework for this thesis. Using Tzvetan Todorov’s classification of the relationship between Self and Other as a methodological framework, I will analyse a total of three dimensions of the relationship between the Dutch Self and the mof as Other in moffenkluchten. These three dimensions (axiological, epistemic and praxiological) shall also be explained in more detail in the first chapter. The second chapter, that considers the axiological dimension, is meant as a more detailed introduction to the

moffenklucht by examining the connection between imaging and humour at play through the

stereotype of the mof and the genre of the klucht. The third chapter, the epistemic dimension, offers an analysis of the varied characterizations of the mof, revealing the complexity of the stereotype, and the normalization of the negative image of the German immigrant throughout the seventeenth- and eighteenth century. Whereas the third part of my analysis focuses on the comic character of the mof itself, the fourth and final part of my analysis, the praxiological dimension, focuses on the ways humour is used in the plotlines of these farces to actively create a certain distance between the Dutch Self and the German Other in the play.

Through this multileveled analysis of the genre of moffenkluchten, I will argue that the negative imaging of Germans that plays such a big part within the political and social xenophobia of the second half of the eighteenth century, has its origin in the humorous representation of moffen in almost two centuries of moffenkluchten. When it comes to the interaction of humour and imaging, I do not think we can ever really speak of ‘simply innocent entertainment’.

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1. The politics of humour and imaging: a theoretical framework

Moffenkluchten as a subgenre of the early modern Dutch kluchtspelen can be broken down into two

separate components: mof and klucht. Whereas klucht, the Dutch word for farce, is an indication of the presence of humour, the term mof, in turn, is a reference to the negative imaging of the German immigrant. For the duration of this thesis, these two components will be returned to regularly, because when combined, they represent quite clearly the interplay between the politics of humour and imaging in the public sphere in the early modern Dutch Republic. In this theoretical chapter, the ‘humour component’ (klucht) will be discussed first through exploring previous studies of humour and laughter in order to find an efficient framework in which to discuss this subgenre of the farce. In the same manner, the ‘imaging component’ (mof) in this chapter follows an inquiry of previous studies of imaging, ‘othering’ and stereotyping. Because a well-rounded analysis of moffenkluchten requires not only a full comprehension of both components, but also a constant awareness of how they interact,

mof and klucht, like humour and imaging, shall during the remainder of this thesis repeatedly be

reflected on as interconnecting phenomena.

(Moffen)klucht: the politics of humour

Though humour and laughter are two different things, ‘laughter […] is a physical, physiological action that often, but not necessarily, arises in response to humour’12_{, they have mostly been studied in}

tandem, resulting in three major theories. Though these theories are in no way final and, as pointed out by Nicholas Holm in his book on the political aesthetics of media humour, should not be considered as ‘full accounts of how humour operates, but rather as what they are: models’13_{, they do offer an}

insightful introduction into the complexity of laughter and humour, and their effects. Starting with the oldest of the three: the Superiority theory, in which laughter is considered as an expression of supremacy and as having origins in the ancient roar of victory. This theory of humour’s aggressive side, ‘offers an interpretation of the comic as a site of ridicule, rather than rejoicing, that serves to reaffirm existing structures of power and ways of being.’14_{However, the Superiority Theory already fails to}

acknowledge the ambivalence of humour as it does not explain targetless jokes and the playfulness of joking within friendly relationships.

A more recent theory is the Incongruity Theory, which suggests that laughter ensues as a reaction to the breaking of a pattern of expectation. Initially this theory, as opposed to the more

12_{Holm, Humour as Politics, 19.} 13_{Ibid., 11.}

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8 negative point of view taken in the Superiority Theory, is prone to invite a notion of humour as something positive and desirable because it focuses on the subversive properties of humour. However, there have already been many before me who have pointed out that incongruity only offers a limited insight into the complicated workings of humour, and there have even been others to explore the more pernicious sides of incongruous humour.15

The last theory of humour is not so much about the question of what causes laughter, but rather about laughter’s ability to relieve tension. This Relief Theory is often used in connection to the Superiority and Incongruity theories, for example in the way it aims to explain how aggression can only be expressed through laughter in those (incongruous) moments when a joke causes a sudden outbreak of (repressed) feelings of superiority.16_{Besides this psychological - or Freudian - Relief Theory}

of laughter as relieving repressed feelings, Dutch sociologist Giselinde Kuipers also points out the sociological Relief theory, in which laughter is believed to relieve feelings of social tension or oppression.17

When it comes to the effects of humour, scholars have, for a long time, mostly focused on the positive connotations of humour as having liberating and critical properties. Even in the case of

moffenkluchten, the focus always lies on the positive viewpoint of these farces as simply a form of

(innocent) early modern public entertainment, a case of comic relief. Though this conception of

moffenkluchten as simply ‘innocent entertainment’ denies the complexity of humour in the public

sphere, it is not uncommon for instances of comedy to be dismissed as such. Kuipers discusses this phenomenon through an analysis of the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005, in which a series of twelve comics related to the Islam and the prophet Mohammed caused worldwide riots.18_{She argues}

that in this transnational ‘humour scandal’, ‘existing power relations were not criticized but rather reinforced, impeding open exchange.’19_{She blames this on the framing of these cartoons as}

‘non-serious’. By referring to them as non-serious, the cartoons were excluded from the serious and rational public discourse, thus denying them any serious import and disregarding all possible offended responses.20

Recently, a more critical tradition has emerged within the field of humour studies in which scholars, amongst who are Holm and Kuipers, look at the negative and conservative effects of

15_{See for example: Kuipers, Goede humor, slechte smaak, 23-27; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 156-158, 202-207;} Holm, Humour as Politics, 9-12.

16_{Kuipers, Goede humor, slechte smaak, 32.} 17_{Ibid., 33.}

18_{Kuipers, ‘The politics of humour in the Public Sphere’.} 19_{Ibid., 64.}

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9 humour.21_{Like Kuipers, Holm also points out the tendency of academics to read humour ‘as an}

exercise opposed to serious critical or political consideration.’22_{He too criticizes the way scholars often}

attribute an inherent progressive political power to humour and calls for scholars to reformulate their theories of humour in a more nuanced way that takes into account the ‘internal variations and complexity of actual aesthetic manifestations of humour.’23_{In the third chapter of his book, ‘Telling}

Jokes to Power: The (A)Political Work of Humour’, Holm makes a useful distinction between ‘political’ and ‘politicized’ humour. He sees politicized humour as ‘the category of comedy that addresses the practice of politics’, politicians and their political campaigns for example, while his description of political humour revolves around the idea that humour does cultural political work in the way it can challenge or reinforce existing power structures.24_{Holm correctly points out humour’s ability to do}

cultural political work, but he limits this to humour that is (directly) critical of present day cultural politics. Though Holms distinction between politicized and political humour is a crucial one to make when researching the politics of humour, his is a train of thought that could, and should, even be taken a step further. Therefore, this thesis will consider the way in which conservative humour - humour that Holm refers to as a-political - also has a way of doing cultural political work.

Another scholar who has done important research on the negative aspects of humour is British sociologist Michael Billig. In Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour, Billig questions previous theoretical assumptions about the innate goodness of humour and offers instead a critique that ‘locates humour in the operations of social power.’25_{Through theorizing ridicule as}

having a central disciplinary social role in life that is often overlooked, Billig aims to draw attention to the more malicious sides of humour. In his analysis of the disciplinary functions of humour, Billig argues that incongruous behaviour, for example incorrect utterances by children, often invites a laughter that is ridiculing the behaviour and in this way disciplining the child. However, while learning the correct behaviour by being disciplined through laughter, the child is also learning how to mock others who break rules by observing his parents’ laughter. Billig uses the example of parents disciplining their children through laughter to show the possible negative effects of incongruous humour.26

Scholars like Billig, Holm and Kuipers, do not necessarily deny the critical and liberating aspects of humour, but they challenge the assumption that humour is in the first place a positive force of

21_{See for example Billig, Laughter and Ridicule; Holm, Humour as Politics; Kuipers, Goede humor, slechte smaak;} Kuipers, ‘The politics of humour in the Public Sphere’; Nieuwenhuis, Onder het mom van satire; Nieuwenhuis, ‘Conformist Comedians’; Zijp, Rethinking Dutch Cabaret.

22_{Holm, Humour as Politics, 26.} 23_{Ibid., 51.}

24_{Ibid., 60-61.}

25_{Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 3.} 26_{Ibid., 200-235.}

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10 subversion. Though their theorizations of humour create a valuable platform for a more critical view of the politics of humour, they mostly focus on contemporary instances of humour or aim to draw more general conclusions about humour in our time. There is, however, a case to be made for applying this more critical standpoint to humour of the past as well. Dutch humour scholar Ivo Nieuwenhuis has recently taken on such a critical point of view in his research on Dutch humour in the eighteenth century. In ‘Conformist Comedians: Political Humour in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic’, for example, he states that in the eighteenth century as well, ‘comedy [could] be used to defend the status quo and to silence subversive voices’.27_{Nieuwenhuis’ research into eighteenth century comedy and}

satire presents an alternative and much more complex image of humour by looking at the conformist effects of political comedy in the past through the case study of the Dutch Republic.

Although my analysis, like that of Nieuwenhuis, also deals with the (conservative) politics of historical Dutch humour, it concerns a very different comic genre that exists on the complex intersection of humour and imaging rather than that of political comedy and critical thought (Nieuwenhuis’s research focusses mostly on forms of journalistic satire like pamphlets and journals). Kuipers also touches upon this intersection of humour and imaging in her previously mentioned analysis of the Danish cartoon crisis. She calls attention to the exclusive aspects of humorous communication by pointing to the role of power relations and elements of control that ‘can be disguised in a jocular tone or a funny picture.’28_{She argues that humour can form a bond between}

people who laugh together, but that this laughing together can exclude those who cannot (or do not wish to) share in this laughter. This conceptualization of humour is fundamental for my own research.

Moffen(klucht): the politics of imaging

The notion of humour as having both the ability to connect and include, and the ability to divide and exclude, brings to mind the same kind of power relations that are at play in ideas of identity and imaging in processes of ‘othering’. In postcolonial theory, ‘othering’ has been described as generating a discourse of both difference and similarity in an attempt of someone, or a group, to establish a self-identity. In Alison Mountz’s essay on the Other in Key Concepts in Political Geography she describes how in the process of ‘othering’, persons or groups are labelled as deviant or non-normative through the constant repetition of characteristics about that group of people who are distinguished from the norm in a certain way.29_{This constant repetition of characteristics forms an interesting parallel with}

27_{Nieuwenhuis, ‘Conformist Comedians’, 103.}

28_{Kuipers, ‘The politics of humour in the Public Sphere’, 77.}

29_{A. Mountz, ‘The Other’, in: Carolyn Gallaher et. al. (Eds.), Key Concepts in Political Geography (London, 2009),} 328-338, here 328.

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11 early modern farces, in which the repetition of characteristics was used as a strategy to develop stock characters that were easy to recognise for an early modern audience.

Though ‘othering’ is most often thought of in the context of postcolonial or feminist studies,30

Mountz also distinguishes immigrants and refugees as those who are othered, for example through categorization and public discourses that characterize particular groups of immigrants. Though German immigrants were not explicitly discriminated against as a group when they first came to the Dutch Republic, on which I will elaborate in the next chapter, the fact that the farcical subgenre of the

moffenklucht arose so quickly - and playwrights tended to follow current phenomena of their time -

shows that the Germans very rapidly became categorized within public discourse as a group with a specific set of characteristics that could easily be transformed into recognizable stock characters.

This categorizing of the Other in discourse is also an important aspect in sociologist Stephen Harold Riggins’ The Language and Politics of Exclusion: Others in Discourse, in which Riggins states that in the discourse of difference and similarity, the one who wishes to create or uphold a self-identity is embracing certain identities as similar, and rejecting others on the base of being dissimilar. This can range from judging these others as a little bit different to rejecting them as extremely and incomparably different than the Self in question.31_{According to Riggins, it is still perfectly possible for}

the Other to assimilate in whole or in part if at least outwardly conforming to the social norms of the society of the Self.32_{The fact that the German immigrants initially assimilated quite well in the Dutch}

Republic thus did not necessarily exclude them from being perceived as Others.

The postcolonial concept of ‘othering’ is aptly linked to the idea of the stereotype in Michael Pickering’s Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation.33_{In the third chapter of his book, Pickering}

connects Self and Other to a discourse of subject and object. In this light, the Self can be seen as the subject, while the Other is the object. Pickering suggests that, ‘the concept of the Other is an advance on that of the stereotype. It heightens attention both to the subjugation of the stereotypical Other, and to those who produce the stereotypical object and thereby by implication define themselves as subjects.’34_{The stereotype thus serves the purpose of being the opposing and objectified Other to the}

subjects attempt in creating a self-definition. In this process of stereotyping the Other, one can find different attitudes towards this Stereotype, ranging from ‘mild condescension to out-and-out hostility.’35_{In referring to the conceptual thinking of the Other as done by Frantz Fanon and Simone}

30_{From which the most famous studies are by, amongst others, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), Frantz Fanon} (1925-1961) and Edward Saïd (1935-2003).

31_{Stephen Harold Riggins, The language and politics of exclusion: others in discourse (Thousand Oaks, 1997), 4.} 32_{Riggins, Language and politics of exclusion, 5.}

33_{Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (London, 2001).} 34_{Pickering, Stereotyping, 71.}

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12 de Beauvoir, Pickering argues that ‘it is not only certain non-European peoples who have been seen as the Other of white, civilised nations in the West.’ Within Europe, other groups, for example women, have also been constructed as such, showing the intersections of gender and ethnicity in this process of creating an image of Self and Other. This intersection is also shown in moffenkluchten through the fact that the female German immigrant is made into a separate stock character within the overarching stereotype of the German mof.

Pickering emphasizes the fact that the Other as object has an unequal position in relation to the subject Self. The ones doing the ‘othering’, taking on the role of subject in objectifying the Other, occupy ‘a privileged space in which they can define themselves in contrast to the Others who are so designated as different.’36_{In the process of the subject defining an image of the Self, a typology is}

often created that connects specific characteristics to the Self and attributes other characteristics to the Other. In Andere landen, andere mensen: De beeldvorming van Holland versus Spanje en Engeland

omstreeks 1650, Marijke Meijer Drees uses a nineteenth-century translation of Hugo de Groot’s Parallelon Rerumpublicarum (1602) to analyse the typology that existed for the early modern Dutch.37

She gives an overview of characteristics based on Hugo de Groot’s Parallelon, that she argues were part of a common image of the Dutch Self at the time. According to Meijer Drees, the Dutch saw themselves, amongst other things, as unbound, open-hearted, brave, honest, loyal, chaste, generous, simple, honorable, unwavering, competent and - in a positive sense of course - big drinkers.38_Dutch

Historian Remieg Aerts also notes how the early modern Dutch emphasized characteristics like a sense of freedom, simplicity, bravery and unadorned prosperity.39

In his contribution to a collection of essays on civility in the early modern period edited by Harald Hendrix and above mentioned Marijke Meijer Drees, Aerts concludes about these national self-typologies circulated by Dutch humanists in the sixteenth and seventeenth century that they relied heavily on old-established theories on climate and humours, and old Batavian and Germanic images. This is something that is also argued by Lotte Jensen in her account of early modern Dutch imaging of the Germans.40_{According to Jensen, the climate theory that entailed that people differed based on}

varieties in climatological circumstances in which they lived, like location, soil and weather conditions, was often used in works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century physicians and was likely to have influenced the imaging of Germans at the time. Tacitus’ Germania was probably equally as influential,

36_{Pickering, Stereotyping, 73.}

37_{Marijke Meijer Drees, Andere landen, andere mensen: De beeldvorming van Holland versus Spanje en Engeland} omstreeks 1650 (Den Haag, 1997).

38_{Meijer Drees, Andere landen, andere mensen, 28-56.}

39_{Remieg Aerts, ‘De burgerlijkheid van de Gouden Eeuw’, in: Harald Hendrix, & Marijke Meijer Drees (Eds.),} Beschaafde Burgers: Burgerlijkheid in de vroegmoderne tijd (Amsterdam, 2001), 5-22, here 8.

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13 if not more so, in the imaging of German immigrants in the Dutch Republic. In Germania, written in 98 A.D., Tacitus wrote about the habits and living circumstances of the inhabitants of Germanic territory. Germanics plentiful drinking and eating habits were amongst those admired by Tacitus. However, in early modern times, these were translated into negative habits like gluttony and drunkenness. Interestingly enough, many of the characteristics Tacitus attributed to the Germanics were also thought to be applicable to the Batavians (in whom the Dutch saw their own ancestry) because of their close affiliation to the Germanics. In early modern writings, and especially in moffenkluchten, most of the negative characteristics were however reserved for the German characters. By satirizing characteristics of the Other that also applied to the Self, the own people were temporarily freed from that same negative reputation, showing the interconnection between self-imaging and the image of the Other.41

In contrast with a self-typology, another set of characteristics is oftentimes made for those who do not belong to the self. These characteristics of the Other are often more negative and sometimes even a direct antonym to those attributed to the Self. In the introduction to Vreemd volk:

Beeldvorming over buitenlanders in de vroegmoderne tijd, Harald Hendrix gives a few examples of

existing stereotypes in the early modern Dutch Republic: the Spanish were seen as proud, the French as fickle and the Germans as drunks.42_{He states that the Dutch Golden Age was pre-eminently an era}

in which the everyday confrontation with all sorts of strangers created a multiplicity of perspectives on foreigners and the relationship between identity of the Self and identity of these Others.43_Hendrix

also makes a connection between stereotypes and literature as he argues that writers often base their work on a repertoire of fixed elements, stereotypes and clichés; recognition and repetition are important elements in many forms of literature, and, especially in humorous genres, easily recognisably stereotypes are often the key to success. By using a fixed set of rules when it comes to the characterization of their characters, however, authors not only conform to common value judgements about strangers, but they also uphold these stereotypes.

In Onbekend maakt onbemind: Negatieve karakterschetsen in de vroegmoderne tijd, Hendrix elaborates even more on the connection between stereotyping and literature and pays specific attention to the genre of dramatic performances.44_{He states that early modern playwrights would}

often fall back on the aforementioned repertoire of stereotypes in their efforts to design ‘a large variety of human types with clearly distinguishable and preferably oppositional traits, based on their

41_{Jensen, ‘Moffen-beeld bij de toneelschrijver Isaac Vos’, 24-27.}

42_{Harald Hendrix, en Ton Hoenselaars (ed.), Vreemd volk: Beeldvorming over buitenlanders in de} vroegmoderne tijd (1998), 12.

43_{Hendrix & Hoenselaars, Vreemd volk, 2.}

44_{Harald Hendrix, ‘Introduction. Imagining the other: on xenophobia and xenophilia in early modern Europe’,} Leidschrift 28:1 (2013), 7-20.

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14 status, their looks and on their behaviours’ in reaction to the stereotypical characterization elaborated by contemporary theories on human character.45_{Hendrix also notes in this article that the delicate}

balance between negative and positive assessments of otherness tended to get monopolized by feelings of hostility towards what was perceived as foreign that could easily predominate in moments of conflict, crisis or disorder.46_{Something that could just as well have been the case for immigrants in}

the Dutch Republic in the time the economy started to decline at the end of the eighteenth century.

Moffenklucht: the relationship between Self and Other

In the introduction of his previously mentioned analysis of the Other in discourse, Riggins points to Tzvetan Todorov’s study of the Spanish conquest in Mexico, The Conquest of America, in which Todorov establishes a typology of the relationship between the Self and the Other.47_Todorov

distinguishes three dimensions of this relationship. First there is the axiological dimension of a value judgement about the Other: is the Other considered as good or bad, the Self’s equal or inferior to the Self, etcetera. The other dimensions that Todorov identifies when it comes to the Other in relation to the Self are the epistemic and the praxeological dimension. The epistemic dimension is that of knowledge about the Other: how well does the Self know the Other, or how ignorant is the Self of the Other’s identity. The praxeological dimension is the active level of identification with the Other. In this dimension there is either an action of rapprochement or distancing in relation to the Other that is somewhere within the scope of submission to the Other and submission of the Other to the Self. In this dimension there exists also a third level, that of indifference, or neutrality. Todorov argues that though relations between the three dimensions do exist, ‘knowledge does not imply love [a value judgement], nor the converse; and neither of the two implies, nor is implied by, identification with the other.’48

For my analysis of the relationship between the early modern Dutch Self and the mof as Other within Dutch comedy, I will be using Todorov’s classification as a methodological framework. Where Todorov’s method focusses on imaging and not humour, I will use it to look at the creating of an image through humour. Following Todorovs three dimensions, this thesis consists of three interconnected analyses of moffenkluchten. The first part, that focuses on the axiological dimension considers the

moffenklucht as a genre, and how the emergence of the genre not only went along with sentiments

of the time, but was also in itself a very telling value judgement of the German immigrants that came

45_{Hendrix, ‘Imagining the other’, 16.} 46_{Ibid., 10.}

47_{Riggins, Language and politics of exclusion, 5.}

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15 to the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. To be able to say anything about the imagined value judgements of Germans on the Dutch stage, it is important to get a clear grasp on what moffenkluchten were exactly.

The second part focuses on the epistemic dimension of the relationship between the early modern Dutch theatregoer and the mof. It explores the knowledge that is taught to the early modern audience through the image of the mof that became normalised in these farces throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century. This part of the analysis is based on the concepts of ‘schemata’ and ‘activity types’ as theorized for characterisation in dramatic discourse by Jonathan Culpeper and Dan McIntyre on the basis of Stephen Levinson’s Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings.49

The mof on the Dutch stage was a very complex stereotype, consisting of a multitude of stock characters, for example ‘the bragger’, ‘the dim-witted servant’, and the female version of the mof: the ‘moffin’. For an early modern audience, each of these stock characters came with a different set of expectations as they became more frequent on the Dutch stage. By analysing the variety of stock characters based on the German immigrant and their development through time into a cultural repertoire, it will become clear what knowledge, but more importantly what normalised image the early modern Dutch came to have about the German stereotype over the course of these two centuries.

As this second part of the analysis is about the characterization of the mof, it will be focused mostly on the ‘imaging component’ of moffenkluchten, whereas the last part is much more an analysis of the ‘humour component’ as it considers what exactly humour does in moffenkluchten. This third and last part of my analysis is focused on the praxeological dimension of the relationship between Self and Other as it considers the ranging levels of distance or rapprochement that are created between the Dutch Self and the staged German Other through the uses of various humour forms and -strategies. Using recent theories on the politics of humour, I will consider how humour generated social boundaries between the Dutch and the Germans in moffenkluchten over the course of the early modern period, divided into ‘early seventeenth century’, ‘late seventeenth century’, ‘early eighteenth century’ and ‘late eighteenth century’. For each of these time periods, the plotlines and ruses of two

moffenkluchten that are representational for that specific period will be discussed in more detail.

By considering both the humour- and the imaging component of moffenkluchten in these three dimensions of the relationship between the Self and the Other, this thesis not only aims to give a more critical view of the early modern genre of moffenkluchten, but it also means to give new

49_{Stephen Levinson, ‘Activity types and language’, in: Paul Drew & John Heritage, Talk at Work: Interaction in} Institutional Settings (Cambridge, 1992), 66-100; J. Culpeper & D. McIntyre, ‘Activity types and characterization in dramatic discourse’, in: Jens Eder et. A. (Eds.), Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media (Berlin, 2010), 176-207.

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16 insights into the negative politics of humour and the conservative role of humour in the imaging of others in public entertainment.

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17

2. Value judgements: an introduction to the Moffenklucht

In order to get a full understanding of the interaction between humour and imaging in the portrayal of German immigrants on the early modern Dutch stage, it is first and foremost a necessity to understand what these moffenkluchten were, what they meant for early modern people, and where they came from. In order to get a better understanding of the genre, the two key components of the

moffenklucht will be addressed here as follows: the ‘humour component’ is looked at through the

overarching question ‘what is a klucht?’, and the ‘imaging component’ through the question ‘who were these moffen?’.

Moffen(klucht): introducing the German immigrant

The Dutch Republic, and Amsterdam in particular, attracted a huge variety of migrants. Not only was the Dutch Republic economically prosperous, but it was also attractive because of its relative (religious) tolerance.50_{To keep the economy flowing, the demand for labor force in the sixteenth- and}

seventeenth century was great both in cities and in rural areas and strangers were more than welcome to fulfill this need. Though the term ‘stranger’ in those times did not necessarily refer to people from outside of the Republic - it often referred to people from outside of the city in question as well -, after the proclamation of the Republic at the end of the the sixteenth century, the definition of ‘stranger’ became more and more connected to the notion of ‘those from outside of the Dutch Republic’.51_The

daily interactions with all sorts of strangers resulted in a multiplicity of conceptions about these newcomers and the relationship between the Dutch identity and those of others.

A substantial amount of the immigrants that came to the Dutch Republic were Germans. Many of them were men, but there was also a significant amount of German women that came to the Netherlands to work for rich Dutch merchant families as handmaidens for some time. Many of the men were seasonal or guest workers that came to the Netherlands to work the fields or to find work in the cities in service positions. A great lot of Germans came to the Republic as soldiers or sailors as well and an even greater amount ended up staying permanently in the Republic.52_{Some permanent}

immigrants were the effect of the chaos in Germany caused by the Thirty Years War, however, many probably did not initially plan to stay but stayed after meeting their future spouses. According to Jan Lucassen, roughly one of twenty seasonal workers eventually stayed in the Republic because of this

50_{Herman Obdeijn & Marlou Schrover, Komen en gaan: Immigratie en emigratie in Nederland vanaf 1550} (Amsterdam, 2008), 25-27.

51_{Obdeijn & Schrover, Komen en gaan, 29.}

52_{Jan Lucassen, Dutch Long Distance Migration: a Concise History 1600-1900 (Amsterdam, 1991), 56-67; Obdeijn} & Schrover, Komen en gaan, 29-30.

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18 reason.53_{This was, however, more often the case for German men than it was or German women, as}

the Republic had a surplus in women at the time.54

The steady influx of German immigrants not only influenced daily life in the Republic, but it also had its impact on the (public) entertainment of the time. This was especially the case after 1580, when the number of German immigrants increased both absolutely and proportionately and the region of origin expanded.55_{This was also the period in which, as far as we know, the first}

moffenkluchten made their appearance. Particularly in these first phases of the growing German

immigration to the Dutch Republic, the voluminous group of German newcomers evoked quite a bit of resistance with the Dutch, and the moffenkluchten became a very popular way of ridiculing these Germans. In these farces, the German immigrants were mockingly called mof, poep, mier or knoet and they were repeatedly accused of being price cutters (Dutch: onderkruipers) - because of their willingness to do work for a lower than average income -, of bad hygiene, and of boasting and pretending to be of higher ancestry than they were.56

It is argued that the Germans that came to Holland and stayed there quickly assimilated into Dutch society because many of them found a Dutch wife. This idea has greatly influenced the current conception of moffenkluchten as innocent entertainment, at least until the second half of the eighteenth century, when a declining economy and growing patriotic movement lead to anti-immigrant, and specifically anti-German sentiments, as the immigrants became unwanted competition on the labour market.57_{Pieter van Wissing notices a similar development in the Dutch}

sentiments towards immigrants in the second half of the eighteenth century in his recently published book In Louche Gezelschap.58_{Though Van Wissing’s book focuses specifically on the work and life of}

writer Philippus Verbrugge (1750-1806), he places Verbrugge in the tradition of contemporary writers who also criticized the quickly improved social position of the German immigrants at the cost of their countrymen. Van Wissing too notes the fact that moffenkluchten played an important role in the negative imaging of the Germans in the Dutch Republic that became so prominent at the end of the eighteenth century.59_{However, he does not actually elaborate on what that role entails.}

As the Dutch sentiments towards Germans change over time from the initial reaction to the first big and ever growing stream of German immigrants to a seemingly improved cohabitation as a result to the German’s quick assimilation, to xenophobic sentiments caused by a declining economy

53_{Lucassen, Dutch Long Distance Migration, 56-67.} 54_{Ibid., 59.}

55_{Ibid., 57.}

56_{Obdeijn & Schrover, Komen en gaan, 64.} 57_{Theeuwen, ‘Een fictieve broodschrijver’, 97.}

58_{Pieter van Wissing, In louche gezelschap. Leven en werk van de broodschrijver Philippus Verbrugge (1750-1806)} (Hilversum, 2018).

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19 and growing patriotic movement, the value judgements towards the Germans that are portrayed in

moffenkluchten also change in accordance to the context of the time. Moffenkluchten do not only

become more hateful and xenophobic, they also become more explicitely political in their message. Many of the prejudices about Germans in the second half of the eighteenth century find new life in the figure of the duke of Brunswijk, who embodied many a cliche about moffen.60_{The anti-German}

sentiments in eighteenth-century farces were more often from a nationalistic point of view connected to anti-British thinking, seeing the Germans as collaborating with the enemy.61_{To better comprehend}

these developments in the staged value judgements of the mof in moffenkluchten, it is important to gain a better understanding of the early modern farce and its place in early modern Dutch society.

(Moffen)klucht: introducing the early modern Dutch farce

In the early modern Dutch Republic, three main types of plays could be found: tragedies (Dutch:

tragedie), comedies (Dutch: blijspel) and kluchtspelen. Tragedies were longer, serious plays that were

deemed a high class form of cultural entertainment. In the case of comedies and farces, the distinction between genres was less clearly made in the early modern period. This immediately becomes apparent by the definitions given by Cornelis van der Plasse, publisher of the works of Bredero, in 1638:

‘Tragedies gave priority to dignity and stateliness, as was fitting for significant personages: kings, royalty, priests, magistrates, nobles, military commanders and such like; in castles, cities, palaces, town halls, armies and churches; and the language, like the characters, was also full of majesty and high-flown, the outcome bloody, terrible, and important. Comedies sprang lustily onto the stage, with lighthearted battles amongst the scum of the folk: shepherds, farmers, labourers, innkeepers, landladies, procuresses, prostitutes, midwives, sailors, spendthrifts, beggars and toadies; in fields, forests, huts, shops, inns, pubs, on the street, in alleys and slums, in the meat hall and at the fish market; the chatter that goes around there is true to life, and the outcome farcical and pleasant.’62

60_{Wissing, In louche gezelschap, 54.}

61_{Theeuwen, ‘Een fictieve broodschrijver’, 97.}

62_{Quoted in E. K. Grootes, Het Literaire Leven in de Zeventiende Eeuw (Leiden, 1984), 64, translation in: Angela} Vanhaelen, Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City (Hampshire, 2003), 4.

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20 Contemporary descriptions of the farce genre are usually not so different from that of Van der Plasse, except a more clear distinction is nowadays made between farce and comedy. The genres might not be so different in content, but they do in differ in form: blijspelen were usually much longer than kluchtspelen.

One of the leading specialists on the topic of farce on an international level is humour scholar Jessica Milner Davis. Her 1978 study Farce, for which she has recently written an extensive new introduction, can be seen as canonical within humour studies. In this study, Jessica Milner Davis offers a broad but detailed overview of the history of Farce from its origins in the Italian commedia dell’arte to modern usage of farce techniques in film and other media.63_{Amongst other national farce}

traditions, Davis focuses on Italian, French, German and British and even non-European farce traditions. Dutch farce traditions, however, are nowhere to be found in her work. Davis refers to Eric Bentley’s definition of farce as ‘practical joking turned theatrical’, but continues to strengthen our understanding of farce by attributing the following characteristics to the genre: a farce is short, it delights in taboo-violation, it tends to debar empathy for its victims, it is peopled by simplified comic types, it favours direct, visual, and violent physical jokes, it is open to aggression, self-indulgence and just plain rudeness, its guiding rule is to tread a fine line between offence and entertainment and lastly, it is essentially conservative.64

Another attribute of farce Davis mentions is that it avoids implied moral comment or social criticism. This, however, contradicts the aforementioned characteristic of farces as essentially conservative. Therefore, I disagree with Milner Davis’ definition when it comes to this point. As shall be explored further in this thesis, even when humour is not criticizing the established order, it does not mean that there is no underlying (subconscious) moralization or latent social communication in such a conservative humour form, for example the establishing of a normative negative image of these German immigrants through the creation of a cultural repertoire of stock characters.

Davis distinguishes four categories within the genre of farce: the Humiliation or Deception Farce, the Reversal Farce, the Equilibrium or Quarrel Farce and the Snowball Farce. She describes Humiliation or Deception Farces as plays ‘in which an unpleasant victim is exposed to their fate, without opportunity of retaliation.’65_{These farces exist mainly of unidirectional jokes. Reversal Farces}

are plays in which the tables are turned on the initial jester, allowing for retaliation for the original victim. In the case of an Equilibrium or Quarrel Farce, the plot focuses on ‘a narrow perpetual-motion kind of movement, in which two opposing forces wrestle each other literally or metaphorically, in a

63_{Jessica Milner Davis, Farce (1978/New Introduction 2017).} 64_{Milner Davis, Farce, 2.}

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21 tug-of-war without resolution, remaining in permanent balance’.66_{Lastly, in the Snowball Farce, the}

characters are all equal in the way they are all caught up as victims in an elaborate series of misunderstandings and mistakes, often caused by powers beyond human interference, like natural forces and inanimate objects. When it comes to moffenkluchten, they often take on the form of a Humiliation or Deception Farce, but in some cases also a Reversal Farce. In all cases, it is the mof character that is, in the end, duped by the joke in the farce, whether he is duped by a trickster or whether he is himself the original trickster on whom the tables are turned.

Other than defining farce and it’s different forms, Davis also points out the paradox of farce as the genre continues to be held in low repute, even though history shows that farces where proven crowd pleasers. Within Dutch history, the farce as dramatic art form has also long been on the side-lines of research, despite the popularity of the genre during the early modern period and particularly the seventeenth century. The seventeenth century can overall be seen as a golden age for the Amsterdam theatre life. Not only because of the professionalization of the theatre through the founding of the first official theatres (schouwburg in Dutch): first the Nederduytsche Academie in 1617 and later the Amsterdamsche Schouwburg in 1637, but also because of a significant increase in the number of published plays. Femke Kramer, in her account of Rederijkerskluchten (farces by the Dutch

Rederijkers, or rhetoricians) in the sixteenth century gives an extensive overview of farcical theatre in

the period before the professionalization of the Dutch theatre.67

When it comes to the interpretation of the genre, there have been a lot of misunderstandings about farce. For example, it was long thought that farces were meant as entertainment only for the lower classes as they often dealt with lower class characters and situations. However, using information on play consumption and profiling strategies by regents, Angela Vanhaelen argues that ‘these types of plays were embedded in a mercantile middle-class context, where they certainly were directed at an audience beyond the lower classes.’68_{In his study on the influence of Boccaccio’s}

Decamerone on three seventeenth-century Dutch farces, literary historian René van Stipriaan has also

delved deeper into the topic of appreciation of the farce genre during this century. According to him, farces were often performed on the Amsterdam stage at the end of serious and tragic plays, as a way of taking away the melancholic feelings a tragedy could cause for the audiences. This would indeed mean that farces were meant as entertainment for the same audiences that attended more complex plays like tragedies.69

66_{Milner Davis, Farce, 7.}

67_{Femke Kramer, Mooi vies, knap lelijk: Grotesk realisme in rederijkerskluchten (Hilversum, 2009).} 68_{Vanhaelen, Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam, 5.}

69_{René van Stipriaan, Leugens en vermaak. Boccacio’s novellen in de kluchtcultuur van de Nederlandse} renaissance (Amsterdam, 1996), 34.

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22 In Comic print and theatre in early modern Amsterdam, Vanhaelen pays special attention to the influences of French Classicism on vernacular farce performances during the second half of the seventeenth century. In the 1670s and 1680s, new Schouwburg regents, influenced by the newly founded society Nil Volentibus Arduum, thought the traditional public farces to be too inappropriate for their children and hoped instead to stage a new type of comic play in which the ‘stock comic characters (…) were no longer from the ‘scum of the folk’; instead, these new plays featured the adultery, fraud and deception of immoral burgher characters in dissolute middle-class households.’70

As my analysis of humour forms and -strategies throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century

moffenkluchten traditions will show, alterations to comic plays like those of Nil Volentibus Arduum are

likely to have influenced the humour in the (sub)genre of Moffenkluchten as well.

Another lack of consensus surrounding farces is focused on the question of the genre’s purpose. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre’s entry on farce touches on the debate between scholars on whether farces were meant as entertainment or as edification. This debate is worked out in more detail by Ferket in her recent dissertation on social criticism in seventeenth-century comic theatre in the Netherlands.71_{She also differentiates two scholarly traditions within this debate: those who deem}

the most prominent qualities of farce to be humour and entertainment,72_{and those who claim that}

farces, influenced strongly by classical rhetoric, were first and foremost meant for teaching a moral lesson, often concealed by the humorous facade.73_{Ferket places herself within this debate on the}

functions of farce by combining a more critical view on the genre of farce as a way of criticizing societal problems with the idea of ‘laughing at others’ as a means to create solidarity within the audience.

Moffenklucht: staged value judgements

I have already discussed the specifics of the farce genre through the work of Milner Davis, but what exactly makes a klucht a moffenklucht? Keeping in mind that the distinction between comedy and farce was not always as clear in the early modern period, I consider a play a moffenklucht when it is a comic play in which a mof either has a prominent role, or the mocking of a mof is a central issue in the

70_{Vanhaelen, Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam, 10.}

71_{Johanna Ferket, ‘Hy dwong het volk door klucht te luistren naar hun plichten’: Maatschappijkritiek in het} zeventiende-eeuwse komische toneel in de Nederlanden (unpublished dissertation, 2019), 15.

72_{Some who see farce as mainly meant for humour and entertainment are Willem Ornée and Arjan van} Leuvensteijn: Willem Ornée, ‘Het kluchtspel in de Nederlanden’, Scenarium 5 (1981), 107-121; J.A. van Leuvensteijn, I Grootegoed and M. Rebel, J. Nooseman, Beroyde Student en J. Noozeman Bedrooge Dronkkaart of Dronkke-Mans HEL (Amsterdam, 2004), 24-25.

73_{For those who consider farce as purveying a moral lesson, see for example Mieke B. Smits-Veldt and Jan Henk} Meter: Mieke B. Smits-Veldt, ‘Samuel Costers Teeuwis de Boer: “vol soeticheyt van sin en woorden”‘, Spektator 5 (1975-1976), 668-711; Jan Henk Meter, ‘Amplificatietechnieken in Bredero’s ‘ Moortje’’, Spektator 14 (1984-1985), 270-279.

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23 plot. By using a combination of information offered by the databases ONSTAGE74_{and Ceneton}75_and

by looking at play descriptions, character lists and the use of words like mof, poep, knoet, I found a total of forty-seven early modern Dutch moffenkluchten (for a list of all moffenkluchten that I have found in chronological order, see the table below. I do not claim this list to be definite or even undisputable, however, it might function as a valuable starting point for further research into the topic of moffenkluchten). I have chosen to focus my research mostly on moffenkluchten in Amsterdam, not only because of the flourishing theatre life that the city saw during the early modern period, but also because Amsterdam was the main urban receiver of German immigrants. Early modern middle class

Amsterdammers were not only frequent theatregoers, but they are also likely to have been familiar

with German immigrants and their workings in the city, making the Amsterdam stage an almost natural platform for these comic plays about moffen. This does, of course, not exclude the chance of

moffenkluchten having been performed in other Dutch cities as well, creating an opportunity for future

research.

Chronological list of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moffenkluchten

Year Title Author notes

1615 Klucht van Meyster Berendt Unknown

author this farce is attached to Samuel Coster’s Rycke-man: ghemaackt op het misbruyk van tydelijcke have ende op het

onbehoorlijck onderhoud van den armen, which Pieter van Wissing claims as the very first moffenklucht in In Louche Gezelschap (2018), but which I do not consider a moffenklucht because other than one specific passage on Germans immigrating to the Republis, the play is not necessarily focused on German immigrants

1619 Klucht van den Hoochduytschen Quacksalver G. A. Bredero

1640 Boertighe clucht van Claes Klick Jan van Arp the original was published in 1632, but that version did not contain a German character. The mof was added in this later version by adding a whole new ninth scene

16?? Kluchtigh tijdtverdrijf by de worste-ketel, ofte vermaakelyke 't samen-koutingen, waar in verhandeld word het leven en wandel der Westfaalsche dienstmaagden

Unknown author

1642 Klucht van de Moffin Isaac Vos originally published as Klucht van Loome Lammert

1644 Klucht van de Mof Isaac Vos

1644 Klucht van Robbert Leverworst Isaac Vos

74_{ONSTAGE : Online Datasystem of Theatre in Amsterdam from the Golden Age to Today (University of} Amsterdam) [http://www.vondel.humanities.uva.nl/onstage/].

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24

1654 Klucht van de moffe-trouw Anthony

Hendrickx 1661 Die Historie van Slennerhinke Lanlaup,

Hellenvaurt, un Juffren-Hijlk Unknown author The original was probably written around 1630 but the oldest known print is from 1661 in a collection of four farces in Low German under the title Den Wesvaelschen Speelthuyn

1664 De gestoorde vreugd P. E.

1665 Klught van Hans Keyenvresser, zijnde een

Hoogduytschen quacksalver Willem Godschalck van Focquenbroch

1670 Iemant en Niemant Isaac Vos

1678 De Wanhébbelycke Liefde Lodewijk Meijer

1684 De Stiefmoer Thomas Asselijn

1684 De Stiefvaer Thomas Asselijn

1684 De Belachelyke Jonker Pieter Bernagie though some of the characters in this farce say mean things about Germans, I am not sure if this could be seen as a true moffenklucht considering the fact that the only character in this farce who frequently visits Germany to trade his goods (Karel) is actually the one to win Johanna’s hand in marriage after a fight with the French Eduard

1684 De Romanzieke Juffer Samuel Coster

1685 De ontrouwe kantoorknecht en lichvaerdige

dienstmaagd Pieter Bernagie

1689 De gelukte list of bedroge Mof Lodewijk Meijer Newly written farce, attached to a translation of a French play by De Subligny by Nil Volentibus Arduum

1691 Melchior, baron de Ossekop Thomas Asselijn

1691 De Hoogduitsche Kwakzalver Ysbrand Vincent musical farce/farcical opera piece 1692 Klucht van de Kwakzalver Thomas Asselijn

1692 De besteedster van meisjes en minnemoers

of school voor de dienstmeiden Jac de Rijk

1699 De Mansmoer P. W. van Haps

1701 Historie van Slenner-Hincke Van Bevervoorde 1703 Het bedurven huishouwen Enoch Krook &

Daniel Kroon

1712 De Zwetser Pieter

Langendijk 1712 Hans Koekop, of de gemaakte waterzucht J. Pook 1713 De Hedendaagse bankroetier achterhaalt Frans Ryk

1717 De Schoonste Diederik

Buisero published after the author’s death (1707) by Gijsbrecht Gazinet, presumably written around 1685

Ca.

1750 Vermakelijke-klught van de hoogmoedige Mof in zijn levry-pak, ondekt door zijn lands-meisjes

J. W.

Ca.

1750 Bedrogen mof Unknown author

1778 Jurjen Lankbein, of de mof commis J. A. Schasz provoked a polemic about German immigrants, including an anonymous reaction in the form of a written dialogue titled De kantoor-subodinatie, of de mof meer gewild als Hollander, written in the same year

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25 1779 De door Patricius verlichte vaderlanders, of

het rijk der moffen uit Isaac van Campen 178? Jaloursen Joseph of aankomst van Dikke

Louis Joseph Keizer

1781 De bedrooge Mof Johannes

Nicolaas Esgers 1781 De Mof meesterknegt of de vader met zijn

zeeven dochters A. Contraduc

1781 Antimoffiana of de president en de

pensionaris, gezworen vyanden van den Mof meesterknecht

Unknown

author direct reaction to De Mof meesterknegt 1782 De Mof meesterknegt of de vader met zijn

zeeven dochters A. Contraduc sequel to De Mof meesterknegt 1782 Madretsma of de zegepraal van den braven

vaderlander A. Contraduc second sequel to De Mof meesterknegt

178? De Hertog van Wolfenbuttel Unknown

author

1782 Pluto, mof en vluchteling Unknown

author

1782 Pluto in het bosch Unknown

author Sequel to Pluto, mof en vluchteling 1784 Het politicq en staatkundig marionetten spel,

in de tent de oranje-boom Unknown author a play with puppets rather than a moffenklucht with actors portraying moffen

1785 De Aristocraten Unknown

author Ca.

1800 De duyvelbanders, of de bedroogen officier, en de doorsleepen Mof te Muyden Unknown author

Because a huge chunk of source material got destroyed when the Amsterdam Schouwburg and its archives burned down in 1772, it is almost impossible to recreate the way these plays were actually performed. The farces used for this research are thus all printed text versions of plays and, with a few small exceptions, the main focus shall thus lie on the humour in the plot and the textual imaging of the mof rather than ways in which the mof could have been portrayed by an actor or possible other forms of performed humour like slapstick (unless this physical humour is also expressed in the text itself).

As the German characters in the farces are created by a Dutch playwright, moffenkluchten are of course not reliable sources for realistic representations of German immigrants in the seventeenth century. I shall thus not use moffenkluchten for an attempt to say anything about actual Germans in the time, rather I wish to use them as a case study to look at the workings and interplay of humour and imaging in the public sphere.

The fact that these moffenkluchten were so very popular amongst early modern audiences in the Netherlands, is in itself already an expression of a negative value judgement with respect to these German immigrants as it shows that the image sold in these farces was one that was very enthusiastically received, at least by the Dutch middle class. This was probably the case because this

Ridiculing the Other The Politics of Humour and Imaging in early modern Dutch moffenkluchten